This 24hr Book video gets across the atmosphere of the weekend a group of us worked together on making A Vauxhall Chorus, a collaborative book which left all involved feeling excited by the potential of this way of making fiction.

Friday, 18 December 2009

Know Your PlaceFirst of all, a heads up about Know Your Place, a panel debate discussing the role and value of writing residencies, hosted by UrbanWords and Spread the Word on 2nd February 2010. Writers-in-residence can now be found in many places: at airports, bus stations, in shops and even on the Tube. But what impact do these residencies really have on the people, places and organisations involved, and how do they, in turn, shape the writing that's created? What are the objectives of those who employ writers this way, and what impact do these have on the writers themselves? What role do writers have - and what role could they have - in regeneration and place-making?

Join writers Lemn Sissay, Kat Joyce and Sarah Butler, plus Tamsin Dillon (Head of Art on the Underground), Charles Beckett (Arts Council England) and Emma Hewett (Director of Spread the Word) for a lively debate in the fabulous German Gym, a Grade II listed building in King's Cross, now redeveloped as the visitor centre for the King's Cross Central Development, one of the largest urban regeneration projects in Europe.The event runs from 6.00 - 8.00pm on Tuesday 2nd February. Feel free to join us at 5.30pm for a free, short introductory talk on the King's Cross development.Find out more and book tickets on Spread the Word's website.

Writing in Three DimensionsUrbanWords has commissioned the poet, Linda France, to share her experience of and ideas about writing and public art. Writing in Three Dimensions is an engaging article, discussing the difference between writing for the page and writing for a place. You can download it for free from A Place For Words.

**Meanwhile I'm delighted to be guest blogging for the next few weeks at Apples & Snakes' splendid website www.myplaceoryours.org.uk

Thursday, 17 December 2009

“Lydia Davis's “The Cows” is like a story Ludwig Wittgenstein might have written about cows after first going insane.” – James Warner, identitytheory.com

The Electric Literature present the 6th installment of their video series, “Single Sentence Animations.” Authors choose their favorite sentences from their stories in Electric Literature who give them to 'brilliant but unhinged animators'.

On the Transliteracy.com website, Sue Thomas writes that she had challenged students with computer science backgrounds to memorise a few stanzas of Keats. She was "very surprised when, a few days later, Dave Soden, one of those students, sent me this link. He had set La Belle Dame Sans Merci to music and performed it himself with a guitar accompaniment. The result? This haunting and memorable song." And it is.

Thursday, 10 December 2009

Once upon a time books were made of parchment and carried around in buckets. Then came the codex, designed by early Christians as a means to fix the canon and make sure no one glued extra bits onto the end of scrolls. The first books, hand written by teams of monks, cost a fortune. Gutenberg invented the printing press but went bankrupt when his invention failed to catch on. It took the Reformation to make publishing commercially viable, when every faction going was producing new tracts and pamphlets. The paperback provided cheap portable fiction for the troops and the workers.

The e-reader briefly bridged the gap between page and screen, but soon every laptop and mobile was a platform for prose. Far from killing literature, new devices led to a renaissance of artworks mixing text and images, sounds and conversations. The book was no longer defined as an object but as an experience, a unit of meaning, some of which were produced in beautiful, customised printed form, others in lavish online editions. But perhaps surprisingly the term remained—thanks to Macbooks and Facebook, Audiobooks, Digibooks, Skybooks, ifbooks etc, but the term was used to include events, performances, recordings, websites which demanded a certain level of attention. And all books were also communities, though mostly quiet ones, like library users silently sharing the same virtual space.

Libraries used to contain copies of works that were otherwise inaccessible to people without parting with their cash. Books were chained to desks, then loaned out for short periods, then after culture went up to the cloud, their role became really important, providing a safe local space in which to meet real people with the expertise and ideas to help us each explore our particular interest.

Where once people had been intimidated but uplifted in places of culture such as theatres and libraries, now all content emanated from the same devices. There was no longer any need to differentiate much between movies, books, ifbooks, pop music and opera. Whereas once these commodities were sold and performed in completely different places for different prices, now all was stuff, funded from the licence.

So we needed to create new means to uplift the spirit and encourage deeper attention and focus. Unlibraries flourished—designed to inspire and intrigue through displays, events and atmospheres which helped minds to expand; they sold and loaned out souvenirs of intellectual journeys undertaken there, were havens for debate and the simple, basic pleasures of social networking.

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

HERE is the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's new review of public libraries, presented in a format based on the Institute for the Future of the Book's CommentPress, and featuring an article by me!

Rachel Cooke wrote in the Guardian, "The document has a title so hilariously nebulous, not even the writers of The Thick of It could improve on it. "Empower, Inform, Enrich" – sounds like a scented candle"

I was involved in the DCMS consultation process much earlier on, then sent in my piece on a vision of the Unlibrary of the Future when I heard they had commissioned articles. It didn't cross my mind that it would actually be published. so when I was invited to the launch as an author, I assumed it was an administrative error. Imagine my surprise...

Tuesday, 1 December 2009

I was so sorry to miss the MAC exhibition in Paris this November where my friend Julie Dalmon de St Gast showed these amazing glass objects, props from the performance piece she involved me in writing many years ago, my first online collaboration. Gigogne's Kitchen was very well received I hear and may be travelling to other venues - and maybe one day the whole work will be brought into existence.